How to be social (while keeping your compliance department happy)

Disclaimer: This is an unsolicited recommendation. I received no compensation or promotional consideration from the company described below.

Compliance is a sticky issue and a lot of professionals (especially those who work in larger investment firms) are discouraged or even forbidden from participating on social media because of potential compliance issues.

But we live in a socially connected world so those professionals who want to generate leads from the web need to find a way to connect with prospects but ALSO keep the compliance department happy.

I’ve seen a couple different ways that companies do this on social sites:

There’s the blanket disclaimer that is jammed into the tiny character-restricted profiles on Twitter or Facebook. They all say something like “Historical performance does not guarantee future performance” and “tweets should not be taken as advice”… or something like that.

There’s the link to the disclaimer in the profile, although if you only have one link it’s kind of disappointing to use only URL to link to your disclaimers instead of anything else!

I’ve even seen an attempt to jam disclaimers into a tweet in brackets or hashtags. Disastrous!

None of these options are ideal so I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about CMP.LY, a company that is innovating in the compliance space. (If ever there was an opportunity, this is it!!!)

They’ve created a compliance framework — a group of disclosure services specifically designed for different compliance needs.

CMP.LY works like this: You (or your firm) sign up for the level of compliance disclosure you need. You get a unique page where you can place your disclosures. Then, when you post on social media, you can include the short http://cmp.ly/XXXXXX link that alerts readers to your disclosures. (Here’s a generic example specific for finance and here’s another generic example specific for an agent).

I think this is smart: You get a link that is consistent across all of your media but also fairly transparent that it is for compliance purposes. Plus, you can measure the data.

To learn more about the different compliance codes in their framework, and to get some at-a-glance details about how to deploy it across different social media, check out their compliance framework page.

I haven’t seen it widely used. However I appreciate their innovative approach and I think it could become a standard in social media compliance. Could this be the tool that will help your compliance department finally agree to allowing its agents and brokers to use social media?